Saturday, November 15, 2014

I've been super honoured to give an ignite talk during DevOps Days Vancouver 2014. Ignite talks are intense, as the slides mercilessly fly-by every 15 seconds, and this for 5 minutes sharp (yes, that's just 20 slides!).

In this talk, I tried to present some of the lessons we've learned at Unbounce while rebuilding our page serving infrastructure. Our availability target is five-nines (that's an allowance of 6 seconds of downtime per week) so we've put lots of effort into building a stable, self-healing, gracefully-degrading piece of software. We had a few close calls though, hence the lessons learned shared in this talk.

I was initially planning to cover this subject in a 30 minutes talk and had gathered tons of material to go in-depth, so delivering this material in 5 minutes was an interesting challenge! It was good actually, as it forced me to be drastically concise, while trying to preserve interesting content.

If you can put up with my French accent, you can watch the recorded presentation here:

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

If you're using AWS SQS and SNS for more than trivial things, you've probably wished that you could run your queues and topics locally, and be able to peek at the message flows happening in topics subscriptions.

Enter yopa, a local SQS and SNS simulator whose sole purpose in life is to make developers' lives easier! Open sourced by Unbounce and coded in Clojure by yours truly, yopa builds on the solid foundation of ElasticMQ and adds its own SNS implementation.

Granted, yopa only supports SQS and SNS for now so it's light years away from truly being Your Own Personal AWS but, hey, let's start small and see where it goes. And actually, there are already discussions about adding support for some EC2 and S3 APIs features as well.

So if you're using SQS and SNS, please give yopa a try! Pull requests are more than welcome.